Total War: Attila

Battlefield Hardline

Homeworld Remastered

There Came an Echo

Warhammer 40K: Regicide is Battle Chess with Chainswords

There are wheels within wheels at Nintendo these days, and even prior to the company announced last week it was moving into mobile online games (as well as prepping a new unit, codenamed NX), it was difficult not to approach many of its releases like Trojan horses. Would this one be prototyping a free-to-play business model, or having fun with the possibilities of Amiibo, or pushing the boundaries of franchising, or experimenting with cross-platform play, or dipping yet another tentative toe in the frothing waters of online gaming? The more modest the release, the more likely it looked that it was smuggling some shareholder-friendly motivation by you - the recent Pokémon Shuffle being a case in point.

In the future, social anxiety will be weaponised. That is to say, in the future, social anxiety will have a lot to use whatever weapons you'll be carrying around. Helldivers is actually a top-down shooter for up to four players, and it sees you blasting your path through procedurally-made alien worlds as a cheery space fascist, spreading Managed Democracy across the universe. So, far, so Heinlein. But this is also the latest game from Magicka developer Arrowhead Game Studios - aright and studio, whose logo shows an arrow going through somebody's head. In other words, you should expect a few quirks. The biggest of these is friendly fire: it is so terribly easy to shoot your own team-mates in Helldivers. It's so terribly easy to be shot by your own team-mates. Or stepped on by them if they've unlocked mechs. Hell really is other people.

For a game that has no pressing reason to be, Mario Party 10 makes a decent fist of justifying its existence. It still suffers from many of the same problems as its predecessors -inconsistency and repetition, outrageously underhand CPU opponents - but developer Nd Cube has at least attempted to inject some fresh ideas into a series that, as recently as two games ago, was beginning to feel well past its sell-by date.

Vocal interaction with video games is definitely not new. We've all allow fly with a string of preference expletives thanks to a inadequately placed checkpoint or a low-cost shot that leads to an unfounded Game Over screen. More rare are the games that truly listen to what you say, and respond in kind.

If elusive - dream, from Sega's super-creepy Seaman to PS3 obscurity Lifeline, and on through the trials and tribulations of Tom Clancy's EndWar and too many Xbox games with inorganic Kinect features, the idea of talking to the screen and seeing your commands acted out remains a powerful -. Indie strategy game There Came an Echo comes closer than most, but can't quite sell the technology in the long term.